Saturday, February 4, 2017

The Dangerous Criminalization of Fulani Ethnicity

The Nigerian mass media—and the online echo chambers they
have spawned on social media and elsewhere—have normalized the pathologization
and criminalization of the Fulani ethnic identity through their popularization
of the odious “Fulani herdsmen” collocation. Criminalizing and pathologizing an
entire ethnic identity is often the precursor to genocide.

That’s why an ignorant and hate-filled preacher by the name
of Apostle Johnson Suleiman could glibly tell his church members to extra-judicially
murder “Fulani herdsmen.” “And I told my people, any Fulani herdsman you see
around you, kill him,” he said in a widely circulated video. “I have told them
in the church here that any Fulani herdsman that just entered by mistake, kill
him, kill him! Cut his head!”

Before I am misunderstood, let me be clear that I am not defending,
excusing, or minimizing the mass murders attributed to some “Fulani herdsmen”
in Agatu, southern Kaduna, and elsewhere. No human being deserves to be killed
by any group for any reason. For as long as I breathe, I will always defend the
sanctity of human life. That’s why, although I’m not a Shiite, I came down very
hard on the Buhari government for its horrendously bestial mass slaughter of
innocent Shiites in 2015.

But we can condemn a wrong by a people without tarring an
entire community numbering millions of people across vast swathes of land in
West Africa with a broad brush. The Fulani people are far and away the most widely
dispersed ethnic group in West Africa. And, although they dominate the cattle
herding trade, they are not all cattle herders, and most cattle herders aren’t
violent and murderous. Nor are all cattle herders Fulanis.

Most importantly, though, although “settled,” urban Fulanis
are mostly Muslims, cattle-herding Fulanis are mostly neither Muslims nor
Christians. Their whole religion is usually just the welfare of their cattle.
In addition, cattle-herding Fulanis don’t recognize, much less have loyalty to,
Nigeria’s prevailing geopolitical demarcations. In other words, they are not
invariably northerners.

So if they have sanguinary clashes with farmers, those
clashes aren’t instigated by religion or region. They are just age-old
farmer/herder clashes. I admit, though, that it isn’t just Middle Beltan and
southern Nigerian victims of farmer/herder clashes that use the lenses of
Nigeria’s primordial fissures to gaze at Fulani herders; northern Nigerian
Muslim politicians, especially those that have a Fulani bloodline, also use
these lenses to defend and protect their “kinsfolk,” often ignorantly and
opportunistically.

In 2000, for instance, General Muhammadu Buhari traveled all
the way from Kaduna to Ibadan to protect Fulani herdsmen who were at the
receiving end of retaliatory killings by Yoruba farmers. Governor el-Rufai is also
a self-confessed Fulani supremacist who once threatened retaliation against
other ethnic groups on behalf of Fulani herders. I think it is these sorts of
misguided parochialisms that conduce to the conflation of Fulani herder
identity with the identity and divisive politics of urban northern Nigerian
elites with tinctures of Fulani ancestry.

But this is all wrong. My late father was raised by Fulani herders for the first 12 years of his life. I also have adoptive full-blooded
Fulani cousins who were raised by my grandfather and my paternal aunt. They
were abandoned at birth in the hospital when their mothers died in labor in my
hometown, and they were adopted by my grandfather. That was not unusual in my
community in bygone days. So when I talk
of cattle-herding Fulani people, I do so with the benefit both of personal experience
and scholarly immersion into their life, history and ways.

The Fulani nomads who destroy communities throughout West
Africa, not just in Nigeria, don't have any sense of rootedness in any modern
nation-state. They are, for the most part, untouched by the faintest sprinkle
of modernity, and owe no allegiance to any overarching primordial, regional, or
religious identity. That’s why they are called transhumant pastoralists.

But there are also bucolic Fulani herders who plant roots in
communities, live peacefully with their hosts, and even speak the languages of
the communities they choose to live in. In my hometown, the Fulani are so integral
to the community that the king of the Fulani, who is appointed by our emir (who
isn’t Fulani), is part of the 7 kingmakers that elect a new emir. These rooted,
bucolic Fulani herders are often exempt from the episodic communal upheavals
that so often erupt between sedentary communities and itinerant herders.

I recall that there was a particularly sanguinary class
between Fulani herders and farmers in the early 1990s that caused so many
deaths in western Borgu. Farmers chose to retaliate the killings of their kind
and organized a well-planned counter attack that caused scores of itinerant
cattle herders—and their cattle—to be killed. What was intriguing about the
counter attack was that the farmers spared all settled Fulani herders. They
told them apart from the transhumant herders because the local Fulani spoke the
local language. Ability to speak the local language indicated that they weren't
the "citizens without frontiers" who unleashed terror on farming
communities.

A similar incident
happened in the Oke-Ogun area of Oyo State in 2000. In the retaliatory attacks
against Fulani nomads who killed farmers, Yoruba-speaking Fulani cattle herders
were spared. Like in Borgu and elsewhere, bucolic Fulani herders are
intricately woven into the fabric of the communities in which they live.

I am saying all this to call attention to the reality that
farmer/herder clashes aren't north-south, Muslim-Christian or ethnic conflicts.
The Fulani who have lived in the south for ages don't see themselves as northerners
living in the south—and they are NOT. In any case, they've lived there prior to
the advent of colonialism that invented the Nigerian nation-state. Notions of
southern Nigeria and northern Nigeria are colonial categories that have little
or no meaning to both the bucolic Fulani nomads who live peacefully with their
hosts and the blood-thirsty, marauding citizens without frontiers who inflict
violence on farming communities all over West Africa, not just in southern or
Middle Beltan Nigeria.

So which of the two categories of Fulani herders do the Nigerian
media mean when they criminalize “Fulani herdsmen?” And which one does Apostle
Suleiman want his church members to murder in cold blood?

But it gets even trickier. Sometime in 2003 in Gombe,
itinerant Fulani herders called the Udawa
killed scores of farmers most of whom were ethnic and linguistic Fulanis.
Former Governor Abubakar Hashidu had to request federal military assistance to
contain the menace of the Udawa. Similarly,
hundreds of Hausa and Fulani farmers in Nigeria’s northwest get killed by
transhumant Fulani herders every year. But such stories don’t make it to the
national news because it isn’t “newsy” to read about Fulani herders killing
Fulani farmers.

The media have a responsibility to let the world know that
it is transhumant herders with no sense of geographic rootedness that are
drenching communities in blood, not all “Fulani herdsmen,” many of whom are
peaceful, organic members of the communities in which they live.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award. He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student. He writes a weekly column for the Nigerian Tribune. His research has won top awards. Read more about him here: https://www.farooqkperogi.com/p/about-me.html